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Four Ways To Avoid Vendor Lock-In When Moving To The Public Cloud

CEO of Heptio, and co-founder of the Kubernetes project. Committed to helping businesses make the transition to cloud native computing.

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The public cloud -- where vendors operating at massive scale provide traditional IT capabilities as a service ­-- has dramatically redefined the IT landscape. Organizations of all sizes can now acquire high-quality, general purpose infrastructure software and technologies on an as-needed basis and provision them almost instantly while being supported by expert operations teams. The advantages of cloud-based, virtualized infrastructure can be tremendous, especially in terms of operational cost, speed of deployment and business flexibility. But with that upside comes the risk of vendor lock-in.

Today, the cloud market is dominated by a few mega-providers: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. On the surface, they deliver a similar looking set of infrastructure, with the virtual machine being the basic computational unit. Under the hood, however, there are important differences among them. While moving an application from one virtualization format to another is relatively simple, each provider offers different and in some cases proprietary services for controlling and connecting applications that run within their respective environments.

That’s where lock-in becomes an issue. Organizations that optimize for a specific cloud provider’s environment -- whether through technology, workflow, tools, expertise or training -- will find it harder to migrate to another provider or move between them without doing some heavy lifting. Often, that outcome is unintentional. Many companies are still in the experimental stage with public cloud projects. While projects may start out at the workgroup or departmental level, they tend to expand or be emulated by other departments, leading to a kind of de-facto, if unplanned, standardization.

Organizations would be wise to preserve their flexibility to work with multiple cloud providers, however. Historically in the IT world, high switching costs tend to reduce the negotiating leverage for customers, to their detriment. The more dependent customers become on the services or software of a single provider, the more likely it is that the provider will adopt a non-competitive pricing strategy.

And then there’s the risk of betting your business on the reliability of a single infrastructure provider. Recently, we’ve seen some high-profile examples of cloud providers suffering significant -- if relatively short-lived -- outages that nevertheless seriously impacted their customers. Imagine the bind that a company could find itself in if its cloud infrastructure provider went down for an extended period of time and the company had no way to easily move its business-critical applications and data to another provider. (By the way, we don’t think we have seen the worst of all possible outages. The most storied problems we have seen so far have resulted from benign mistakes. What would happen if someone deliberately tried to cause mischief behind the scenes?)

Fortunately, there are steps that organizations can take to lower the risk of lock-in (that provide some added business benefits as well).

Where possible, embrace open source technologies.

Open source technologies have become central to the growth and adoption of virtualized applications and infrastructure and have accelerated the development of and migration to the public cloud. All of the cloud providers, to varying degrees, support the integration of open source technologies for containerized applications, services and orchestration. Open source-based cloud services (like Amazon RDS that is based on MySQL or Google Kubernetes Engine that is based on the open source Kubernetes project, of which I was a co-founder) have analogs in other environments, or you could always run your own version if you needed to.

Find your “Goldilocks” abstraction layer.

Frameworks like Kubernetes (which automates the deployment, scaling and management of applications on a group or cluster of servers) level the playing field for companies of all sizes by creating a universal common infrastructure. They hide the details of a given cloud provider's infrastructure from applications. When properly applied, this infrastructure abstraction offers a degree of flexibility to run applications in a wide array of environments without limiting their capabilities. Technology like Linux containers and OSS projects like Kubernetes provide a degree of abstraction that’s not too high level and not too low level, but “just right.”

Be judicious about adopting bespoke services.

In many cases it’s possible, if not always cost-effective, to replicate or find alternatives for some of the services offered by cloud providers. In some cases, cloud services, built on open source technology or common commercial technology, have reasonably compatible analogs either on-premises or on other clouds. In other cases, a proprietary service (like Google’s Cloud Spanner, for instance) would be too costly and complex for most companies to recreate, but it is legitimately remarkable technology. Companies should be deliberate and intentional in choosing when to adopt services that might create a lock-in situation but not necessarily shy away from truly differentiated services that offer deep value. Those should, however, be used with care.

Be deliberate.

Organizations need to invest the time and the resources into making a transition to the public cloud successful. Beyond technology, they need to consider policies, training and processes. The cloud offers a great deal more promise than simply outsourcing the running of basic infrastructure and adopting the practices of the "cloud native" world can have significant benefits in other environments. And the earlier they start, the less likely they are to find themselves having stumbled into a lock-in situation, and the more they will get out of the transformative change that is moving through the industry.

It’s important to keep in mind that all of the steps discussed above are relevant to an organization’s on-premise infrastructure as well. The practices that can help avoid lock-in in the public cloud can also help companies prepare for things like edge deployments in the future.

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